Wall of Shields

The colorless wall built for a mechanic almost nobody used correctly. Banding on a defensive creature is the strange tail of one of the game's most notoriously opaque keywords, and on a Wall it does the one thing banding handles cleanly: it hands the blocking player control of how an attacker's combat damage gets distributed. Stack this in front of a single large attacker alongside other blockers and the wall's controller decides where every point lands, which turns a fat creature into a damage sink whose strike spreads harmlessly across the wall instead of killing your better blockers. That it is an artifact creature, not a colored one, is the design tell: it was meant to slot into any deck regardless of color, a generic stone barrier any control or fortress strategy could deploy. The 0/4 body absorbs (four toughness eats most early attackers, and Defender means it was never going to swing back), but the banding rider is the part that asked the player to actually open the comprehensive rules. Magic in its early years was still willing to print a common whose text most players resolved wrong at the table: a defensive curiosity that paid off only for someone who understood a keyword the game has since stopped printing entirely.